Framed

14

The Sister in charge of Intensive Care was briefed by Dr. Moore, a registrar from Accident and Emergency who had monitored the one serious surviving casualty of the crash from the time the ambulance got to the scene until its return to the hospital twenty-six minutes later.

“I filled in his name on the sheet, but it’s a false name, and there’s no address,” he told Sister. He leaned across the desk and signed the paper for the transfer of the patient to Intensive Care. “I tried to milk some information about who he really is and what he’s supposed to have done, but no dice. You know the police.”

Moore was a tall, thin, hunted-looking man who glanced over his shoulder continually while he spoke to Sister. As he pocketed his pen he stepped to the office door, looked both ways along the corridor and came back to the desk. “I’ll tell you something — since I started my present tour of duty with the blood wagon, I’ll swear I’ve been on a run of bizarre emergencies.”

“How come?”

“On Sunday I’d an attempted suicide by hanging. The rope broke and all he did was put his back out. Then yesterday a woman accidentally Super-Glued her knees to a window ledge, and later I got a bloke who’d swallowed two cubes of billiard-cue chalk. Now this.”

Sister watched the paramedics transfer the unconscious patient to the bed in the cubicle on the other side of the window. A nurse carried the drip bag and hooked it to a stand by the side of the bed. Other nurses came forward and busied themselves around the bed, setting up system-support lines and monitoring equipment.

“What’s bizarre about this one, then?” Sister said. “Not the fact that he’s in police custody, surely?”

“No, it’s not that...”

Dr. Moore scratched his chin, gazing intently at the floor as if he had been asked to give a verdict on something crucial and was choosing his words with the greatest care.

“There’s a strange feel to the whole clinical picture,” he said finally, “but if I had to pin it down, I’d say he’s got deeply creepy physiology. I mean, he took a crack on the head that would have fractured any ordinary skull — which says a lot for his anatomy, too, of course. But that blow would definitely have produced a big hematoma on my brain or yours, even if it hadn’t caved in the skull, and it could certainly be expected to crush a few cervical vertebrae. What I’m saying is, normal individuals don’t get a bash on the head like that and come out of it without serious complications.”

“Actually, he doesn’t look too good to me,” Sister said, peering through the glass. “And I notice he’s wearing a neck harness.”

“The harness is a precaution, I couldn’t find any cervical damage. As for the grim evidence elsewhere on his person, I think you’ll find most of it will wash off.”

“No major damage at all, then?”

“None that I was able to trace. I did a swift neuro-obs, but it didn’t turn up any aberrant brain activity and there’s no evidence of diminished response to stimuli. When they do a CAT scan they might turn up something I missed, but frankly I doubt it.”

“What’s the clinical picture, overall?” Sister asked, picking up a pen and notebook.

“Starting at the top, there’s a cluster of lacerations to the scalp, frontal and parietal. Substantial blood loss, as there usually is with scalp injuries. Nothing complicated there, the tissue parted cleanly, it should unite again with only basic surgical help. There’s a minor dislocation of the right shoulder with probable tearing of the teres minor and infraspinatus muscles — he was handcuffed to a policeman at the moment of impact, so the shoulder came under some uncommon traction in the hurly-burly of the crash.”

“The handcuff explains the tissue injury on the right wrist, I suppose.”

“Right. There’s also some damage to the deeper structures — a dislocation of the wrist with possible bruising of the scaphoid and triquetral bones. Moving down, the chest and abdomen appear to be sound. Both legs are badly bruised, again with probable tearing of muscle fiber.”

“Systemic shock?”

“At first, Sister, it seemed pretty extensive. When we got there the carotid pulse was weak, and my first thought was that we’d lose him if we didn’t act fast. I checked there was no hidden bleeding and got an airway in place double quick. But just about then his vital signs started to improve. All of them, and without any further help.”

Behind them in the office doorway DCI McKinnes shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. Dr. Moore spun around, startled.

“Pardon me, Doctor, Sister. I was eavesdropping; it’s an occupational vice and I’m too old to fight it. Am I to understand, from what you just said, that our man here is in the clear?”

“His head took a hell of a thumping,” Moore said, “but it seems to be an uncommonly strong head. He’s also got excellent neurological and biochemical backup. So, barring unforeseen relapses, I wouldn’t expect his condition to get any worse. He really does seem to have a marvelous constitution.”

McKinnes narrowed his eyes as he peered through the tinted glass into his cubicle. “The devil hardens his own. What’s that going in through the back of his hand?”

“Gelofusin,” Dr. Moore said. “It’s a plasma expander.”

McKinnes frowned at him.

“Nothing serious,” Moore assured him. “Where there’s the chance of shock due to a loss of blood volume, a plasma expander is used to put back some bulk. It improves cardiovascular function and helps the transport of oxygen.”

“Does that mean he might regain consciousness soon?”

“It’s likely. There’s no reason — none that I’m aware of — why he should stay unconscious for long.”

“Good, good.” McKinnes nodded absently for a few seconds, then he stepped out into the corridor. “It could all have been a lot worse,” he murmured, taking his leave with a tight smile and an abbreviated wave.

In another part of the hospital, sitting on the edge of a cot in the emergency cubicle, Larry Jackson sipped hot tea and examined his bandaged hand. He was pale, his skin yellowish and waxy under the fluorescent light. The hand holding the tea mug was trembling. A nurse had told him the pallor and the shakes were normal after an accident: she said he wasn’t to worry. He did not think he was particularly worried, but he was certainly depressed: the sleeves and front of his new jacket were streaked and stained with dark dried blood. It was a write-off.

He took a long gulp of the tea, not minding that it scalded his throat. His throbbing headache was beginning to lift, and now that the bandage had been put on his hand the cuts didn’t hurt any longer, although the hand felt three or four times heavier than normal. He was staring at it again when DI Shrapnel pushed the curtain aside and came in. He had several ugly-looking cuts on his cheeks and there was a row of neat stitches on his forehead. His right hand was bandaged.

“Bloody hell,” he growled, doing a swift visual check on Larry, “did you see the van driver’s head? It was like a squashed tomato. Completely squashed.”

“Shut up!” Larry demanded. He had caught one glimpse of the body lying on the road and had been trying to suppress the image ever since.

“Eddie Myers must have a concrete skull,” Shrapnel said. “Did you hear the bang? Christ, I thought I was a goner.”

“I almost was,” Larry said.

Shrapnel kept the curtain pulled back so he could watch the casualty traffic.

“The guy in the van,” he said, craning his neck to see the face on a stretcher going past, “he must have been trying to spring Myers.”

“Or kill him,” Larry said. He finished the tea, put down the mug and stood up. “How could he have known what was going on? I mean, how could he know we were going out, or where we’d be at a particular time...”

With that question hovering over them they left the cubicle and walked along toward the main entrance.

“Maybe it was an accident,” Larry said.

Shrapnel glared at him. “That was no bloody accident!”

No, Larry thought, it probably wasn’t. At the front door he told Shrapnel he wanted a word with one of the doctors. He said he would come straight to the station when he was through.

“Make sure you do. You’ll have to fill out a full accident report. You know how long that’ll take.”

When Shrapnel had gone Larry took the lift to the second floor. He waited half an hour in the corridor outside

Intensive Care until a nurse came and told him he could have a couple of minutes.

The Intensive Care cubicle was very dim, with only a small lamp switched on near the bed; green light from the screen of a monitor radiated eerily into the shadows. Von Joel lay very still, propped on a rigid angled support, his head bandaged and his arm in a sling. A sheet-draped cage protected his legs; drip lines fed into canulas on the backs of his hands. Larry leaned over the bed, listening to the quiet breathing.

“You awake?”

He drew up a chair and sat down. Von Joel’s lips moved.

“Close shave, huh?” he whispered. His eyes opened and he smiled weakly.

“My new jacket’s ruined,” Larry said. “Covered in your blood, mate.”

Von Joel swallowed and gently cleared his throat, a dry sound like crumpling paper.

“You’ve got to call Professor Wallard...”

“Who?”

“He’s my herbalist doctor. It’s important. See, my system is purified, I want to know what I need to take. He’ll give you a list of vitamins, some stuff for bruising, things like that. I won’t take the hospital painkillers or the antibiotics.” His eyes swiveled toward Larry. “Please...”

“Okay.” Larry shrugged. “But for Christ’s sake keep schtum about it.”

There was a tap on the door. The nurse pushed it open and waggled a finger at Larry, telling him it was time to go. Von Joel seized Larry’s hand suddenly and squeezed it. In the intensity of the moment Larry was able to say what he had come to say in the first place.

“Thanks, Eddie...”

The nurse closed the door behind him. She turned to the bed as Von Joel laughed softly. He appeared, suddenly, to be wide awake and highly alert.

“Can you do something for me, Jackie?” he said.

She blinked at him coyly, stepping closer to the bed.

“How do you know my name?”

“It’s on your lapel.” He gave her his widest, warmest smile. “Maybe you can do me this favor — take a message to my mum. Tell her I’m here, and not to worry about me. I don’t want any of my colleagues calling her, putting the fear of God into her. Can you do that little thing for me, Jackie? She’s at the Hyde Park Hotel.”

The nurse made a half-reluctant frown. She looked at him. His smile washed over her again.

“Have you got a pencil?” he said.

“Sure.” She handed him one from her pocket. “I suppose you want paper. I’ll get some from Sister’s office...”

By the time Larry had written up his reports of the accident, typed them in a slow, two-fingered, deliberate hammer that matched his headache, it was past two in the morning. He let himself in, shutting the front door quietly, and then crept into the living room. He didn’t want to wake Susan or the kids, didn’t want to have to go into all the details of the accident again, he just wanted to crash out on the sofa, but his head kept up the throb, and he had to get some aspirin. He sat at the kitchen table, gulping down the tap water as he popped one aspirin after another into his mouth. He reckoned five’d shift it, but an hour later, with a cushion under his head, his jacket over his chest, the headache persisted, felt, if anything, worse. An aspirin felt as if it had lodged itself in his chest.

The sofa was uncomfortable, too soft. His back began to ache. He sighed, tried curling up on his side, then he felt cold, really chilled.

The fake gas logs gave the room a warm glow, and as he sat staring into the bluish flames, he wondered how Von Joel was. He could still feel, or thought he could, the strange moment when Von Joel had gripped his hand. He’d seemed vulnerable, almost afraid... Larry rested back on the sofa and closed his eyes. At last he was getting drowsy, and he dozed, but after a moment he woke with a start as it happened all over again. The voices shouting, the terror when he’d seen that blue Transit van hurtling toward the car. It all flashed in his head, fast brilliant pictures: he heard Von Joel calling, screaming for him to get down, felt Von Joel throwing his body across the car, the screech of tires, the cracking, crunching sound of the splintering glass and twisting metal. He recalled the awful moment when Von Joel, protecting Larry, saving Larry, took the main impact of the truck as it rammed the side of the car. He could feel Von Joel in his arms, the weight of him held against his own chest, as the blood streamed down his smashed and gashed head. If Von Joel hadn’t leaned over, Larry knew it would have been his own head, his own face slashed by the glass. He would have been in the Intensive Care unit...

“He saved my life.” It came out, but softly, and it shook Larry that he had spoken the words aloud. “He saved my life,” he repeated, and he looked to the mantel where the photographs of his sons smiled at him. It was then he wept, part delayed shock, part relief, and his sobs he kept muffled, hugging the cushion, as he had held onto Von Joel, holding it tightly, not wanting Susan to hear, not wanting anyone to know just how scared he had been.

Early the next morning two frogmen, searching the bed of the Thames at a stretch beside Tower Bridge, hauled up a heavy cylindrical object encrusted with silt, gravel, and decomposing matter from the riverbed. It was taken on board a police launch for examination. When it had been soaked in clean water and gently scrubbed, it was found to be a length of heavy-gauge hessian sacking, wrapped tightly around a shotgun.

Later in the morning, in a discreet office building near Wigmore Street, Larry Jackson was shown into the consulting room of Von Joel’s herbal specialist.

Professor Arnold Wallard was a lean snowy-haired man, magnificently tanned, with a broad natural smile and bright, intelligent eyes the color of flint. His age, Larry thought, would have been impossible to determine from his appearance alone. He wore a gray Italian wool suit, a pale blue broadcloth shirt, and a dark flowered silk tie.

The receptionist closed the door behind Larry and the Professor beckoned him to sit by the magnificent George III desk and unburden himself.

“And do take your time, Mr. Jackson. Haste is bad for the spirit. It plays havoc with the digestion too.”

Larry explained Von Joel’s condition in as much detail as he could, and answered most of the Professor’s questions about the extent and degree of his injuries. The Professor listened carefully, nodding, scribbling an occasional note. When Larry had finished he tented his fingers and stared at the window.

“I believe,” he said slowly, “that I can best serve my patient by making sure that his vital functions, particularly those of the liver and kidneys, are reinforced and quickened during the healing phase — they are, after all, the very functions that will be crucial to the complete recovery of his system.”

He opened a drawer, took out a sheet of notepaper, and set it in front of him. Carefully he unscrewed the cap from a black fountain pen and poised the gold nib over the paper.

“I will make a list, Mr. Jackson, which I want you to take to a herbal dispensary. I will also give you some preparations of my own to take with you. They are what we call cholagogues — preparations to encourage the flow of bile from the liver — and there are teas and tinctures to stimulate kidney function. Then of course there is the important task of detoxifying the system...”

Over a fragrant cup of herbal tea Larry found himself learning again. Between jotted additions to the list, Professor Wallard explained the necessity of removing waste products — he called them metabolites and chemical toxins — from the system, and the importance of accelerating the cleansing process in a body which is injured and therefore vulnerable to the buildup of harmful substances.

Larry also learned something about alternatives, medicines designed to change the metabolism to help the tissues deal better with nutrition and elimination. And there were the aperients, cardioactives, and carminatives, all with their roles to play in restoring and maintaining health.

“The catalog is practically endless, Mr. Jackson, but so is the inventory of human ailments...”

A multitude of hazards had to be considered in a case of physical injury, he said. There was, for example, the danger of low hemoglobin levels, leading to the reduction in the circulation’s ability to carry oxygen, which could lead to anemia.

“Vitamin B is the stuff for that, Mr. Jackson. We must see he does not go without it...”

And there was, of course, the matter of pain relief. Herbalists in Britain, the Professor explained, are nowadays forbidden by law from making use of the analgesic j’ properties of the opium poppy. But there are other natural painkillers, all of them highly effective in the hands of j a skilled prescriber — substances like gelsemium, California poppy, aconite, which is sometimes called wolfsbane, and wild lettuce.

“And the bruising,” Professor Wallard said, “will respond best to arnica — I don’t know if you’re familiar with it at all? It contains certain vasoactive substances — that is, they exert an effect on the caliber of the blood vessels — and although these substances are of frankly uncertain identity, they are extremely effective against bruising, sprains, and swelling...”

The Professor, with infectious enthusiasm, went on for longer than the allotted thirty minutes, filling Larry’s head with snippets and summaries, throwing out hints and tips as he produced neatly packaged preparations from boxes and drawers and put the names of others on the list.

By the time Larry left, he had listened to more about herbalism than he’d believed he ever could. If a tenth of it stuck, it would be acres more than he had known before today. He went off clutching a bag of herbal preparations in one hand and the list in the other, with a map drawn on the back showing him where to find the herbal pharmacy.

He whistled as he hurried along the road, relishing the continuing change in himself and the widening of his horizons. He felt powerfully elated. Knowledge, he thought, was a wonderful thing. And so was herbal tea.

At three-thirty that afternoon, as Larry parked his car outside the house, Susan was sitting at the kitchen table, tittering girlishly at a story DC Colin Frisby was telling her. He was on his hands and knees on the floor by the sink, trying to repair a faulty cupboard door. He found the position no drawback to his style. When he talked to a woman he used his head a lot, moving it this way and that to accompany his parade of expressions; he used different expressions to give his face some animated appeal. He was sure women loved the way he did that.

“No, no, straight up,” he protested, as Susan laughingly dismissed a detail of his yarn. “She said, ‘Well, if you think you’ve got the right girl, search me.’ So I’m doing the business and it’s pat-pat here, pat-pat there, and my Guv’nor walks up: ‘Morning, ma’am,’ he says...” Frisby froze for the punch, his face a masterpiece of loveable fallibility. “She was the new DCI! No kidding!” He waited until Susan’s delighted giggles died away. “You got a screwdriver at all, love?”

In the meantime Larry had let himself in. He opened the door from the hallway and came into the kitchen. The presence of DC Frisby was a surprise. Larry froze by the door.

“Hi!” Susan got up, waving a hand toward the visitor. “I persuaded him to fix the door on that cupboard.” She kissed Larry’s cheek, a light touch of her dry lips. “How are you feeling?” She nodded at Frisby again, who was smiling chummily. “When he came back yesterday, he—”

“I’m fine,” Larry told her, his elation gone, a coldness moving in his stomach. “I’ll pick up the kids if you like.”

“No need, they’ve got football practice until seven. Do you want a cup of tea?” Susan turned to Frisby. “Refill, Colin?”

Frisby was doing an impression of a man suddenly engrossed in a tricky job. Larry asked Susan to give them a second together. Susan went out, pulling a face at Frisby.

“Thanks for dropping by,” Larry said when the door closed.

Frisby mumbled something.

“McKinnes put someone on my kids’ school, is that right?”

Frisby nodded, eyes half-lidded, implying he knew more.

“Well” — Larry gave him a buddy-buddy wink — “don’t let me interrupt you.” He glanced at the cupboard. “Now you’ve started, you might as well finish.”

Frisby nodded again. Larry left the kitchen and went upstairs, taking the bag of herbal preparations with him before Susan poked her nose in and started grilling him. When he had tucked the stuff in the bottom of the wardrobe he stood by the window, hearing Susan and Frisby talking downstairs.

“Little fart.”

Larry heard Frisby laughing again, Susan’s voice answering him about which way she wanted the cupboard to hang, and it irritated him — he didn’t really know why. Frisby and he had never particularly got on and now he seemed to be making himself well and truly at home. Larry was about to go downstairs again, when he thought, “Sod it, I’d never get that ruddy cupboard fixed anyway.” Instead he wondered how he was going to get all Von Joel’s herbal kit into the hospital without DI Shrapnel or one or other of the officers asking him what the hell he was doing. He reckoned a few pounds of grapes’d cover the bag. He knew he shouldn’t be taking even the grapes in, but somehow he felt he owed Van Joel, and besides, he told himself, the stuff’d probably get him cured and out of the hospital faster.

As he passed the kitchen, calling out that he was on his way, Frisby was standing back admiring his handiwork with the cupboard door. Susie beamed from the doorway.

“It’s on the other way around now, much better than the old one, means I don’t keep banging the fridge.”

“Great, I’ll see you later then.”

She gave him a kiss and went back into the kitchen, not even seeing him off. Larry slammed the front door. Maybe having Frisby around was a good thing, they needed the hall redecorated. Maybe he’d mention it to the snide bastard when he saw him at the station. Frisby was certainly making himself at bloody home.

Larry stopped off at the local grocers and bought two and a half pounds of black grapes. He balanced the bag, carefully placing it on top of the herbal medicines in the plastic carrier bag, and went on to the hospital.